Preparing for Population

While we love to help as much as we can wherever we can when your website is being built, there are certain parts that we can only give advice on then it’s over to you. Below is a list of things that you should be aware of and start preparing for when you are able to populate your new website.

Imagery

Selecting the right imagery for a new website is one of the most important parts of populating it. Imagery will be the first thing that grabs the attention of users so it is essential that it does just that. Using imagery that is high quality and also relevant is the best way of ensuring you are catching a users eye.

There are plenty of websites out there that provide high-quality images at varying prices. Stock imagery is the most common and well known but most Stock images are not free. Alternatively, websites such as unsplash.com and pexels.com provide free high-quality imagery to anyone.

Content

Probably one of the most obvious parts of population is content and content is, after all, King. The content on your website is what will help new users understand your business, it will help you rank on search engines and it will get your brands message out there. It is crucial that your website has enough, relevant and unique content to ensure you stand out from the crowd.

Plugins

A Plugin is a piece of software that acts as an add-on to a website to add a specific and additional piece of functionality. A plugin can be anything from a social media feed to a table booking system. We don’t expect you to find them yourself and we certainly don’t expect you to install them but we do ask that before the population stage of the website you let us know what plugins you wish to have added.

Pages

Before population, we would recommend having a clear idea and plan of what pages you would like on your website and the content required for each page. As a bare minimum, we’d suggest Home, About Us, Contact and Services. Naturally, you will likely want additional pages to cover other topics and information so we’d advise having a plan for where you want to add those.

Contact Information

From our experience, there isn’t too much point in spending the time creating a new website with killer content and imagery if there is no way for potential new clients to get in touch with you. Make sure that your website provides relevant and up-to-date contact information so that prospects can get in touch. This includes a phone number, an email address (this can be a support email or someone in the team’s email) and a postal address.

A Domain Name

A domain name is simply your websites name, for example, ours is anglestudios.co.uk or Apple’s is apple.com. Having a short memorable domain name that is relevant to your business’s name is not only important to ensuring that your website can be easily found but your website can also never go live without one.

A Short Domain Name For Email

While this is not as much of a necessity as your websites domain name we would certainly advise you to invest in one. A short domain for email may look something like info@anglestudios.co.uk. While simply having an @outlook.co.uk or @gmail.com email domain works absolutely fine, purchasing your own short domain will make your business look that bit more professional and serious.

Privacy Policy

A privacy policy can easily be one of the most important sections on any website, it details your companies views and procedures on the information collected from users. Although there is currently no law stating that you have to include a privacy policy within your website it is certainly strongly advised as people become more and more aware and concerned about how their information is being used on the internet.

Cookie Policy

This one actually is a legal requirement, The Cookie Law states that websites are required by law to gain consent from the user to store or retrieve any information on a computer, smartphone or tablet. While we will ensure that there is an obvious opportunity on the website for the user to consent or not to the cookies, it is your job to ensure that a policy detailing how the cookies will be used is on the site.

Terms and Conditions

If your website collects any personal information such as email addresses, names, shipping addresses etc. then having a clear set of Terms and Conditions or Terms of Use is highly recommended. These Terms and Conditions set the rules that the user must agree to in order to use the website.